Post Infomercial bits and lots of other quibbles

The day after THE ONE tries to bypass media (sorta) and go “directly to the people,” and there is surprisingly little written yet. It’s an interesting situation. An infomercial buy like this one is nearly unprecedented (except for Ross Perot, but he had cool charts), so it’s hard to decide if it was a good idea or presumptuous overkill. While I’m not seeing too much MSM “reportage” on this yet, I’m not entirely sure why that is. They are so in the tank for BO you’d expect them to vibrate with mass tingles. So, why isn’t the wonderful, hopey, change after-school special of specials headlining all the news outlets’ most prestigious space?

Maybe they aren’t comfortable praising or taking seriously a political infomercial.

Maybe they think taking an infomercial at face value will make them look too partisan.

Maybe they are worried that if they cover it too much it will destroy the delicate balance of kinda sorta equal coverage.

Maybe they were all overcome by the soft focus imagery and soaring music and became mass hypnotized, in a euphoric state usually only found with the VERY best illegal substances.

Maybe they got a collective grip on Uppity’s hopey-change bong.

And maybe they’ll come out of it tomorrow. I don’t know. Note, I don’t for a second believe any sense of ethics or fair coverage is the issue here. Unfortunately, the above “reasons” are entirely ironic. Well, except for the last two. Anyway, here’s a few interesting tidbits.

Read the rest ->

1) At The Corner on NRO, you could expect a tepid response at best, but here’s an interesting point.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think the night worked for him. The last time anyone did this — Ross Perot — it was so weird a world unto itself (strange-looking guy with pie charts) that, beached between Cybill and Murphy Brown (or whatever it was back then), it had a kind of integrity and distinctiveness. This time round, The O Show followed by the Phillies followed by Jon Stewart cumulatively undermined the candidate.

For a start, the show itself was slick only in a drearily generic way. The waving wheat and music made it seem like a standard campaign commercial, only longer — “It’s Morning, Noon And Night In America,” which is a big enough problem thanks to the media’s Obama cultists without the candidate himself piling on. As for the King Barack Meets [Insert Name Of Downtrodden Subject Here] stuff, aside from the fact that I don’t recognize the hellhole this country apparently is, there’s something faintly ridiculous in doing it in the middle of the Phillies winning the World Series. Maybe on Super Bowl Sunday, instead of Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunctioning, Obama could come out and interview people about how our entire rotten society is malfunctioning. And then The Daily Show kibbitzing stepped all over the infomercial even more.

Not having watched the show, I won’t quibble over anyone’s perceptions of it, but I do think it is interesting that it was sandwiched between the World Series and The Daily Show. That would tend to lower the seriousness of the show, if you took it seriously in the first place.

2) How did BO do in the ratings last night? According to Nielsen, he got about 21.7 % of households in top markets. While 21.7 % is not terribly impressive, it’s still 1 in 5 of households with a tv on at that time. But who was watching? I think that’s the more important question.

The Hollywood Reporter translates those Nielsen numbers.

Obama’s 30-minute primetime infomercial was seen by 33.6 million viewers across seven networks — including CBS, NBC, Fox, Univision, MSNBC, BET and TV One.

That’s 70% more people than watched the conclusion of the World Series last night on Fox (19.8 million). Clearly, Obama vs. McCain is more compelling to viewers this week than Phillies vs. Rays.

Nielsen estimates that roughly 71% of viewers were white, 17% of viewers were black and 15% were Hispanic.*

The NYT has a blurb right now, but it’s not worth your time, just a rehash of the above.

3) Newsbusters responded to a WaPo piece about the infomercial.

Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales offered his own endorsement of Obama for President with an oozy review of Obama’s half-hour infomercial, which he called “Obamavision.” That certainly was supposed to carry more than one meaning, including a tribute to Obama’s visionary politics. It wasn’t hidden in tiny type on the home page like yesterday’s sleaze-Internet-cash story. It stood out in bold lettering: “An Appeal to the Masses | Poetic and practical, Obama’s paid political broadcast was a montage of montages.” Shales was more syrupy than that in the full text:

Somehow both poetic and practical, spiritual and sensible, the paid political broadcast, which aired on seven major cable and broadcast networks (on Univision, it was identified as “Historias Americanas”), was a montage of montages, a series of seamlessly blended segments interweaving the stories of embattled Americans with visions of their deliverer, Guess Who.

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The half-hour was underscored with music in a kind of elegiac, Aaron Copland mode — sorrow and stature. Obama seemed as heroic a figure as Henry Fonda’s Tom Joad in “The Grapes of Wrath,” but with more of a Jimmy Stewart personality. He has come, the film said, to show us all the way, and if we don’t know it by now, and after all those millions spent to tell us, it’s our fault.

…Now it seemed to be turning into a Frank Capra movie; after all, “Grapes of Wrath” did not have a happy ending, but, according to last night’s multicast — in spectacular ObamaRama — this movie will.

Spectacular ObamaRama?

ObamaRama? Hey, isn’t supposed to be racist to suggest the guy is a celebrity? And Aaron Copland? He composed “Fanfare for the Common Man.” I don’t think that applies to BO.

4) Naturally, some people OMG just REALLY LOVED the BO commercial and just think it really, like, showed a picture, like, of how Barack can really touch all of us and bring us together in a caring way. Or some sort of drivel. Like this:

This was an expression of empathy, a report from Barack Obama about what he has learned after spending the better part of two years with a hurting populace.

The commercial, which aired on multiple networks at a cost of $4 million to the Democrat’s campaign, was poignant and direct. And it did hold out a measure of the “hope” that has been the essential message of the senator’s once-audacious and now-presumptive candidacy.

Of course, in order to sell change, you first have to sell despair:

But at a deeper level, Obama presented a chronicle of despair:

Sick people are having a hard time paying for medicine.

Old people are working to make ends meet.

Teachers are taking second jobs to pay for food.

Third-generation factory workers are watching the American dreams that they once took for granted turn into nightmares of dislocation and declining prospects.

Yeth, I read thith tho you didn’t have to. Now I have thugar poithning. Gotta get thome lemon thorbet to cut the thweetneth. Blech. Gack.

5) CBSnews had this to say about the infomercial and all those BO promises:

Without question, the Barack Obama infomercial served as a very slick and powerful recitation of the biggest promises he’s made as a presidential candidate. But the very bigness of his ideas is the problem: he seems blind to the concept his numbers don’t add up.

Let’s start with his highly suspect, and widely discredited, claim that he can find federal “spending cuts beyond the costs” of his promises. Very few independent economists believe he has identified the savings needed to offset his remarkable list of tax credits, tax cuts and spending pledges.

After going through a few fact checks, CBS mentions this:

Most of the time he spends the Iraq savings in the context of the roads he wants to build; sometimes it’s for the teachers he wants to hire. Tonight, he riffed rhetorically on the savings, asking how many scholarships could be funded, or how many schools could be built. In the end though, presuming he really saves $90 billion, he can only spend it once.

Remember he also mentioned rebuilding the military ($7 billion/yr); his education initiative ($18 billion/yr); and his energy initiative ($15 billion/yr). He did not mention the $188 billion that he would spend on the brand new stimulus package he has proposed.

Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, CBS. All of us ignorant, bitter, non-professional bloggers have been SAYING THIS FOR MONTHS. Jeeeeez, dude, get a freakin clue.

6) The WSJ has an interesting piece about all the crowds BO attracts.

There is something odd — and dare I say novel — in American politics about the crowds that have been greeting Barack Obama on his campaign trail. Hitherto, crowds have not been a prominent feature of American politics. We associate them with the temper of Third World societies. We think of places like Argentina and Egypt and Iran, of multitudes brought together by their zeal for a Peron or a Nasser or a Khomeini. In these kinds of societies, the crowd comes forth to affirm its faith in a redeemer: a man who would set the world right.

As the late Nobel laureate Elias Canetti observes in his great book, “Crowds and Power” (first published in 1960), the crowd is based on an illusion of equality: Its quest is for that moment when “distinctions are thrown off and all become equal. It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd.” These crowds, in the tens of thousands, who have been turning out for the Democratic standard-bearer in St. Louis and Denver and Portland, are a measure of American distress.
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. . .The coalition that has propelled his quest — African-Americans and affluent white liberals — has no economic coherence. But for the moment, there is the illusion of a common undertaking — Canetti’s feeling of equality within the crowd. The day after, the crowd will of course discover its own fissures. The affluent will have to pay for the programs promised the poor. The redistribution agenda that runs through Mr. Obama’s vision is anathema to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the hedge-fund managers now smitten with him. Their ethos is one of competition and the justice of the rewards that come with risk and effort. All this is shelved, as the devotees sustain the candidacy of a man whose public career has been a steady advocacy of reining in the market and organizing those who believe in entitlement and redistribution.
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This election is the rematch that John Kerry had not delivered on. In the fashion of the crowd that seeks and sees the justice of retribution, Mr. Obama’s supporters have been willing to overlook his means. So a candidate pledged to good government and to ending the role of money in our political life opts out of public financing of presidential campaigns. What of it? The end justifies the means.

Interesting thoughts. It’s simply that a cult of personality has been developed around this dude. We’ve seen it for several months now. The problem is, historically, cults of personality don’t lead to good things. But hey, this guy is the messiah, so I’m sure everything’s copacetic.

7) The Christian Science Monitor has something to take seriously. While this author does not think BO is a socialist or espouses socialist mantras in the classical sense, he does think what could be coming from BO is a kind of socialism.

But what about a milder form of socialism? If reckoned as an attitude rather than a set of guidelines for running an economy, socialism might well describe Senator Obama’s economics. Anyone who speaks glibly of “spreading the wealth around” sees wealth not as resulting chiefly from individual effort, initiative, and risk-taking, but from great social forces beyond any private producer’s control. If, say, the low cost of Dell computers comes mostly from government policies (such as government schooling for an educated workforce) and from culture (such as Americans’ work ethic) then Michael Dell’s wealth is due less to his own efforts and more to the features of the society that he luckily inhabits.

Wealth, in this view, is produced principally by society. So society’s claim on it is at least as strong as that of any of the individuals in whose bank accounts it appears. More important, because wealth is produced mostly by society (rather than by individuals), taxing high-income earners more heavily will do little to reduce total wealth production.

This notion of wealth certainly warrants the name “socialism,” for it gives the abstraction “society” pride of place over flesh-and-blood individuals. If taxes are reduced on Joe the Plumber’s income, the rationale must be that Joe deserves a larger share of society’s collectively baked pie and not that Joe earned his income or that lower taxes will inspire Joe to work harder.

A warning shot that, like Republicans before them, the Democratic party will hew ever more to its extreme wing. We’ll just lurch from idiocies of the right to idiocies of the left. Get out your dramamine. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

8 ) The Hill has an interesting piece that bears watching. As every interest group or constituency that supports a candidate knows, before the inauguration the handout line forms. So, who would have an IOU from BO?

The Accountability Now coalition, whose members include the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), MoveOn.org and the United Steelworkers of America, plans to target members of Congress who waver on their agenda. The group is raising money to fund progressive primary challengers in 2010.

Created by liberal bloggers Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com and Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, the Accountability Now political action committee has already raised $500,000 since starting up in March. The group hopes to press Democrats to use their majorities to pass liberal legislation and work with a White House occupied by Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).
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Joining the Accountability Now coalition means that they’ll extend their political efforts to legislation, particularly on measures that seek to increase healthcare coverage and make it easier to join and form unions, Burger said. SEIU and other coalition members will soon use its grassroots network to knock on doors and make phone calls to put pressure on members of Congress ahead of key votes, Burger said.

And just in case you still think these groups support various people because of principle:

Burger added that SEIU wants the Democratic-led Congress to deliver legislation almost as soon as it arrives.

9)The Boston Globe is starting to wonder if Obama would be a President tolerant of dissent. They’re wondering this now because?????

If opinion polls are right, Barack Obama is cruising to victory. As president, would he show the same forbearance as Bush in allowing his opponents to have their say, unmolested? Or would he attempt to suppress the free speech of those whose views he detested? It is disturbing to contemplate some of the Obama campaign’s recent efforts to stifle criticism.

When the National Rifle Association produced a radio ad last month about Obama’s shifting position on gun control, the campaign’s lawyers sent letters to radio stations in Ohio and Pennsylvania, urging them not to run it – and warning of trouble with the Federal Communications Commission if they did. “This advertisement knowingly misleads your viewing audience,” Obama’s general counsel Bob Bauer wrote. “For the sake of both FCC licensing requirements and the public interest, your station should refuse to continue to air this advertisement.”

Similar lawyer letters went out in August when the American Issues Project produced a TV spot exploring Obama’s strong ties to former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. Station managers were warned that running the anti-Obama ad would be a violation of their legal obligation to serve the “public interest.” And in case that wasn’t menacing enough, the Obama campaign also urged the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation.

In Missouri, an Obama “truth squad” of prosecutors and other law-enforcement officials vowed to take action against anyone making “character attacks” on the Democratic candidate – a threat, Missouri Governor Matt Blunt later remarked, that had about it the “stench of police state tactics.”

Perhaps these efforts to smother political speech are simply the overly aggressive tactics of a campaign in its adrenaline-fueled sprint to the finish. But what if they are the first warning signs of how an Obama administration would deal with its adversaries?

Uh, You think??

10) According to Reuters, Qaeda wants Republicans “humiliated” in this election. Hmmmm. I guess they don’t want Democrats humiliated?

An al Qaeda leader has called for President George W. Bush and the Republicans to be “humiliated,” without endorsing a party in the upcoming U.S. presidential election, according to an Internet video posting.
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SITE (terrorism monitoring group) said militant postings on al Qaeda-linked websites typically discuss Obama in terms of his race, or his religion and foreign policy. Some forecast a racial crisis dividing the United States if he wins. Others say his planned phased withdrawal from Iraq would be a boon to al Qaeda’s affiliate and give it a base for Middle East expansion.

11) I just can’t leave you with something THAT depressing. So, here’s something more lighthearted. Apparently Erica Jong and some of her more delicate friends are having conniption fits – literally worrying themselves to death that BO could somehow not win. According to the New York Observer, Jong gave an interview to an Italian publication and some of her comments reflect the immeasurably great stress she is feeling over this election.

Here’s a translation of Jong’s more spirited quotes to the Milan-based Corriere, as selected by Rocca.

“My friends Ken Follett and Susan Cheever are extremely worried. Naomi Wolf calls me every day. Yesterday, Jane Fonda sent me an email to tell me that she cried all night and can’t cure her ailing back for all the stress that has reduces her to a bundle of nerves.”

“My back is also suffering from spasms, so much so that I had to see an acupuncturist and get prescriptions for Valium.”
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“If Obama loses it will spark the second American Civil War. Blood will run in the streets, believe me. And it’s not a coincidence that President Bush recalled soldiers from Iraq for Dick Cheney to lead against American citizens in the streets.”

She also laments that not all of America’s men of letters share her devotion to Obama.

“Tom Wolfe and John Updike are men of the right and Philip Roth is at this point a hermit who leads a monastic life in Connecticut, far from everything and everybody.”

Luckily, she said there is her and Michael Chabon, who, she says, have “taken the place of Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer respectively.”

I didn’t realize Jong was the new Sontag. Chabon is the new Mailer? I guess I’m the new Molly Ivins then. Except I’m not in Texas. And I don’t write as well as she did. And she was funnier. Oh darn.